


Beautiful Things (Enscapsulate)

by poisontaster



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-13
Updated: 2006-02-13
Packaged: 2018-02-14 13:14:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2193150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Even before he was Angelus, he liked to stare at beautiful things, imprinting them on his memory.</em> Set during "Provider" (S3).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beautiful Things (Enscapsulate)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wisdomeagle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wisdomeagle/gifts).



> Written for [](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/profile)[**inlovewithnight**](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/)'s Fluffython 2006. The request: _light, fluffy, sweet and sexy, no higher than R, good characterization, and a prompt: jewelry and Jane Austen._

_Money’s not the most important thing…_

I.

Angel opens his eyes to Cordelia’s face.

He doesn’t often get to see her like this; not brash and sarcastic and well put together, but when her lip gloss and eyeliner are streaked and the light in her isn’t so much muted as banked. When he can see how delicate and thin she really is. She doesn’t like it when he stares—“Brood much?”—it reminds her too much of Angelus, and so he doesn’t. But even before he was Angelus, he liked to stare at beautiful things, imprinting them on his memory to be reproduced later by his hands on paper.

Connor is sleeping too, between them, making bubbles with his spit. One of Cordy’s hands is cupped over Connor’s round milk-fed belly, moving with the faint ebb and flow of his breath, and something about this is really, really good. Better than he’d ever dared dream. He’s glad he doesn’t have to breathe, doesn’t have to disturb this tableau any more than with his eyes, because if he could, he thinks he’d like to encapsulate this moment and keep it in something like a locket.

In his sleep, Connor twitches, a baby spasm and his mouth flexes as if working a nipple. Cordy’s breathing doesn’t change, but her fingers automatically make tiny soothing circles. After a while, Connor yawns, kicks and lapses back into deeper sleep.

“Angel, if don’t stop staring at me I’m going to put out both your eyes,” Cordy mumbles after a while, half into the pillow. “I mean, I know “vamp” and all, but don’t you ever sleep?”

“I was asleep,” he answers. “I woke up.”

“Oh God,” Cordy groans and turns on her back, scraping a hand through her hair. It falls in careless streaks across the pillow and her face and he composes another mental picture. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Almost dawn.” He doesn’t look at the clock. “Thanks for staying.”

“Mmm.” She scrunches deeper in the bed, eyes still closed, toes wiggling. He notices that although her fingers are unpainted, her toenails are swirls of color like a movie sunset. She moves her hand subtly so that her pinky touches Connor’s knee.

“I mean, I know you were probably anxious to get home and the mattress isn’t the most comfortable…”

“Angel…shut up, okay? Still not awake here and you’re kind of harshing my mellow.” Cordy stretches again, a long catlike arch that makes her tan shirt ride up a little more and her pants ride down. “It’s no big.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry.”

Cordelia sighs and snuggles into the pillow again.

A little later, she sighs a second time, not nearly as dreamily. “ _Angel_. Staring again.”

“How can you tell?” He reaches out and brushes Connor’s closed fist. Like a trick, the tiny hand opens long enough for Angel to put his finger in that surprisingly fierce grip. Fingernails smaller than the head of a nail prick the skin; time to trim them again. It never stops being amazing—how terribly small they are, how incredibly fast they grow.

“I’m really _not_ getting back to sleep, am I?” Cordelia asks rhetorically. She stretches again, grinding the heels of her hands against her eyes and groaning. “Just my luck; all the vamps in all the world, I gotta get the one that’s an early riser.”

She sits up and reaches out to pet his knee absently to take the sting out of the words. He’s very still. Sometimes he wonders if they realize how warm they are, humans—mortals—the lightest touch searing even through cloth. He wonders how they stand it, all that heat. How he did, once upon a time. He can feel where each of her fingers imprinted against the skin.

II.

“Okay, this is the _last_ time you get to pick the movie, like…ever,” Cordy declares. “Isn’t that right, snookums?” The last is addressed to Connor, cupped against her shoulder. Connor has a look of ferocious concentration on his face as he attempts to bring his dinner back up, or at least work a good solid burp out of it.

“You don’t like it?”

Cordelia eyeballs him over Connor’s head. “Oh, _please_ ,” she says, “did you _see_ the earrings she had on? They look like something my Aunt Edna would wear, if I were so uncool as to _have_ an Aunt Edna, which I _don’t_. I’m not even going to ask why you have the…” she squints at the box set, still busily bobbing Connor on one shoulder, “BBC’s Best of Jane Austen Collection for fear it will utterly extinguish what little respect I have for you as my employer.”

Connor burps, loud and fruitily.

Cordelia breaks out in a shining smile and holds Connor up at eye level. Angel cocks his head, saving yet another picture to come out of his hands at some future date. “That’s my good boy!” she says, delighted, before returning Connor to the crook of her arm. Turning back to Angel, she says, “It’s lucky I’m here, you know.”

“Oh?” He’s smiling, he can’t help it.

“Well, if it was left up to _you_ , what kind of education would he have? _This_ special young man needs to know about the wonders of…well, anyone who made music after the seventies, for a start.” She tickles Connor’s nose and he giggles, face scrunching in fat smile lines.

“Can I hold him for a while?”

“Silly,” Cordelia chides. “Of course you can.” She gets up from the chair and brings the baby across to him. He takes Connor but Cordy doesn’t move off right away, one hand resting lightly on his shoulder, her hip against his arm. Her heat and the heat of the infant in his arms soak into his cold skin, and Angel is content to let his head fall back and just…dream.


End file.
